Thursday, March 17, 2011

Nuclear Plants Face Extinction

New nuclear reactors just aren't economical, says the CEO of the largest nuclear operator in the United States. Exelon's CEO John Rowe says that the economics of cheap gas makes a nuclear renaissance unforeseeable for the next few years – and had done so before the quake prompted regulators to politicians to review their policies."At the present time, new reactors are not economical anyway. Natural gas-fired generation is now the economic way to produce low carbon electricity, and that will be true for about a decade," said Rowe in an interview with Bloomberg.

I've been all for nuclear, as the only people who have money to do decent seismic studies. But in the seismic biz, like the Quantum Cat, there are only two states: Willful Ignorance or Total Panic. Right now we'll get statements from the engineer union, or the nukes, trying to quell TP. When this is over, they will use those statements to promote WI. Nobody is saying anything useful, like : "We realize there are major unknowns, and will spend gobs of money resolving them." The engineer union has only concerned itself with wages, and never the state of the craft.

Now, the shale gas industry spends no money on seismic. They willy-nilly start earthquake zones and nobody does anything. So, they will take over power production.

But the biggest cause of Nuke-extinction is the total absence of any designer intelligence in the industry. They are all Soviet operators, putting production over all else. They stick to their age-old safety bibles that were written 30 years ago. They stack up huge problems for the future. These people have totally withdrawn from the public. Can they actually build a new nuclear plant economically? No. Would any of them come out and say they can? No. Only the highly paid and trained talking heads.

And so, my most depressing thing is to put the flowers on new nuclear, and give up hope for any new money on seismic. So boring.....I'm off to the psychiatrist.